defect free software

Understand customer requirements and make your customer understand

You not only have to understand the customer but sometimes you have to make customer understand what exactly he requires to enhance his business. Many a times, a customer is not able to chalk out clearly what business requirements he wants to get embedded in the software. He is not clear about what exactly he should get embedded in the software to get the optimum out of the software and business mix. He might be having a broad idea about what he wants to see as a final product, but may not be able to define what the core components of this product are. Customer would say the team to study their business as they are doing it, without getting involved in it. This could be serious and the seriousness if not understood rightly in time (emphasize on ‘understood’, rightly’ and ‘in time’), would lead to disastrous results.

Customer is not for experimentation. Clear and crisp ‘Requirement freezing’ is the right start. Customer may be required to be educated on what business, requirements and rules can be built in the software. A simulations or scenario generation is important to make customer understand how the software will work once completed. Customer needs to understand very clearly at the initial phases - What ease or comfort will the software bring out to business processes by giving out certain set of business results. Customer has to understand very clearly the other part of the story too. The software definitely will require certain extra skill sets, enhancements, or extra efforts once it is completed and implemented at customer site.

Top 5 Quality killers in a software product

In software development project what matters most is the timely accurate delivery that gives the benefit of defect free product, customer satisfaction, profits, market edge, growth, motivation across the organization etc. All this is not easy to achieve having so many enemies in and outside the organizations that mars the development progress or a sub-standard product. These negative factors or enemies lead to a low in quality product that faces a tough time at customer end resulting in rejection. To name top 5 quality killers in a software product, I would list them as below:
5. Requirements: customer requirements or product requirements is the foundation of software. Any sort of compromise in this would lead definitely to a disastrous product.

4. Management: Intensity of management’s involvement in the product development throughout spells out the success or failure of a product.

3. Documentation: Development plays an important role during a product lifecycle and so does the documentation.

2. Customer Involvement: The involvement of key users at all levels of development and implementation is quite crucial.

1. Testing: ‘When’ to involve the ‘testing’ team defines the earlier successful completion of a project.